Smashing Statues: Re-evaluating Iconoclasm in History

Abstract

Abstract In 2020, as statues around the world were pulled down, intellectuals scrambled to make sense of the phenomenon. Veteran voices joined new experts from varied disciplines in contributing to the established field of iconoclasm studies, adding to the ongoing debates around history, memory, politics and public monuments. This seemingly global movement was fuelled by, and indeed fuelled, debates among the broader public about the meaning of statues in public life, and whether colonial statues of white men with dubious political and moral histories should remain in place or be removed from sight. The movement also met with a certain amount of backlash from conservative commentators who positioned themselves as the champions of Empire and a particular version of history in Britain, and from right-wing groups attempting to defend what they saw as an attack on white culture. The debate around statues, in other words, quickly became politically fraught. The authors ask what four recent works on iconoclasm add to an already extensive literature. What do they bring to the debates around history, memory, politics and public monuments? Two of the books (Thompson and Tunzelmann) are aimed at a broader readership, while the other two (Freedberg and Tugendhaft) are more specialised in their approach. We conclude that what is missing from these works is a global and comparative approach to the destruction of racist statues that also considers struggles against colonialism in national independence and Indigenous resistance movements throughout the modern and early modern periods.